I belong to an internet group called the UCF, who started out as members of John Scalzi‘s Wateveresque forum until an army of trolls came in and set up residence in that once-fine space. We gradually retreated to our own blogs and set up an online community for ourselves. Most of us are aspiring writers, all of us are science fiction fans, and we’re all a little goofy, but that’s about where the similarity ends. We run the political spectrum from socialist to me. There is a lawyer, a film and TV location manager, an administrative assistant at JPL, and editor for Linux Journal, several other IT professionals of various stripes, an architect, a marine biologist, and a former Navy Chief Warrant turned writer and woodworker, among others (oh yeah, and me, a chemist). Over time, I’ve come to regard all of them as friends, although I’ve only met two of them in meatspace.
Science
Quick Climate Change Debate
You might be interested in this 38 minute video. It is a debate between Bjorn Lomborg and Myles Allen.
If you will excuse the pun, it gets a little heated.
(Hat tip to Milo.)
Score!
Yahoo! News/AP: “American Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.”
- announcement
- press release
- scientific background
- information for the public/populärvetenskaplig information/a møøse once bit my sister
- Yoichiro Nambu’s page at the UofC’s “Experts Guide”
We are great and we are grand … we make bombs beneath our stands!
UPDATE: UofC news office release.
Stephenson — Anathem (A Review)
Stephenson, Neal, Anathem
Author Neal Stephenson has forged a substantial body of fiction in the last 15 years by combining elaborate narratives and witty, humourous dialogue with a more serious consideration of scientific and philosophical issues. Having covered nanotechnology, cryptography, and the early stirrings of Newtonian science in his more recent books, Stephenson turns now to cosmology and the nature of human consciousness in Anathem. The biggest of big pictures.
Set thousands of years in the future, Anathem is an adventure story that fits perfectly into the science fiction genre. The conflict between science and culture has led to intermittent but repeated civil conflicts, resolved finally by isolating the scientific and mathematic minds into the equivalent of walled medieval cloisters (maths). Outside the walls society waxes and wanes, prospers and collapses, while inside the walls the life of the mind continues, year after year. Comparisons with the famous 50s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are inevitable.
Obama Micromanages Chemistry
So, I’m paging though Obama’s list of authored bills and I find the Mercury Market Minimization Act of 2007 which seeks, in Obama’s words:
To prohibit the sale, distribution, transfer, and export of elemental mercury, and for other purposes.
Jeeze Louise. Mercury is one of the most widely used elements. I can’t see how we can possibly get by without it. The major source of mercury contamination in fish, which the bill cites as the major harm, is the burning of coal. The idea that we can just do away with one of the periodic elements is just nuts. Hell, we use tons and tons of arsenic every year. The use of mercury is never going away.
And as a parting touch, Obama tosses in a little technological imperialism:
banning exports of mercury from the United States will have a notable affect on the market availability of mercury and switching to affordable mercury alternatives in the developing world.
In other words, if a Third World country cannot use cutting edge technology then they can just do without.